Best practices and new thinking

Ohio Education Matters is dedicated to helping school funding decision makers and stakeholders stay on top of the latest thinking in how best to finance public schools. We provide connections to pertinent resources and support the sharing of best practices as a way to promote innovation and progress in state and local school funding.

Resources

A report by the School Finance Redesign Project at the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education argues that state education finance systems must be completely overhauled in order to raise student achievement. The report, Funding Student Learning: How to Align Education Resources with Student Learning Goals, maintains that increases in education funding have not been matched by corresponding increases in student achievement and calls for a new system of school funding that ties resources directly to students.

Changing the Game: The Federal Role in Supporting 21st Century Educational Innovation argues that to resolve dramatic disparities in educational achievement and ensure future American workers are globally competitive, the federal government needs, as it has in the past, to change the game in public education. In the report released by the Brookings Institution, New America Foundation’s Sara Mead and Education Sector’s co-director Andrew Rotherham say a robust new federal Office of Educational Entrepreneurship and Innovation within the Department of Education would expand the boundaries of public education by scaling up successful educational entrepreneurs, seeding transformative educational innovations, and building a stronger culture to support these activities throughout the public sector.